'Incendies' review: drama (and melodrama) rip a Lebanese family apart

“Incendies” was nominated by Canada for a best foreign-language film Oscar this past year. But the majority of the film is set in Lebanon, the homeland of Nawal (Lubna Azabal), a young woman caught up in the sectarian hatreds that led to that nation’s ruinous civil war. Thirty years after leaving that conflict behind, Nawal dies in Montreal (there’s your Canadian angle), where her son (Maxim Gaudette) and daughter (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) learn upon the reading of their will that, to their shock, they have a brother AND a father who are still alive, and that their mother’s last wish was that they set off to the old country to find them.

What follows is a melodramatic tale of social upheaval, racial hatred, vicious violence, torture, and worse (trust me: worse). There’s a lurid, even twisted air to the proceedings, which derive from a play by Wajdi Mouawad. (Indeed, the connections to opera and Greek tragedy are patent, which isn’t so much to ascribe quality to the film as to give a sense of it.)

Director Denis Villeneuve isn’t shy about milking the sensational story. But he fails to equal the fireworks of the plot with his technique, which is rather pedestrian, or with the acting, particularly of Gaudette and Désormeaux-Poulin, whose characters are little more than ciphers. “Incendies” was likely a crackling thing to read, but it’s not quite so vivid as a finished film.